As a follow-up to our lesson with Jordan Magnusson, we did a group activity in which we put ourselves in pairs and were given the aim of creating our own short game poem (no longer than 2 mins) using mini game engine Bitsy.

I teamed up with Maria and we began brainstorming themes and ideas for our game. We quickly landed on the idea of “fear of loss/losing someone” and started exploring ideas that surrounded that foundation, like paranoia, anxiety, and fear of loneliness.

We decided on a simple premise: the character (a square) would walk through a diorama house in different scenarios, with characters and other interactables placed in different positions each day. At once point in the cycle, once a sense of pattern had been created, one of the characters (we eventually decided on the mother) would disappear, and the player would be made to contemplate it over the coming days, through visual effects.

I found Bitsy’s tile editor admittedly quite tiring to use – even for such a tiny game with so much blatant asset reuse, I found it was probably made with even more restrictions in mind. I often had to combine multiple unique tiles together for certain larger objects like desks, beds and trees: by the end I had 36 unique tiles total in the game!!

Nonetheless, development didn’t take too long – most of the hard work was running our ideas by each other and figuring out what sticks. Some of the sprites went through a lot of iterations too: the limited toolset of Bitsy proved quite challenging to work with, but we resulted in a project that both of us are quite pleased with.